August 9 Sunday – Sam had arranged “business…with Hartford people” on Tuesday (Aug. 11), but moved it up to Sunday so he might return to Elmira the next day [Aug. 15 to Johnson]. The nature of his business with Hartford people is unknown. It is possible that the Hartford people referred to came to New York.

Several newspapers printed nasty things about Sam and the Grant book and the Century Magazine. The Brooklyn Eagle ran this item on page 10 the day after Grant’s funeral:

THE MAN HEAVILY enriched by Grant’s death is Mark Twain. He is the principal in the firm of Webster & Co, the publisher of Grant’s biography. He has already received orders from the army of canvassers for three hundred thousand and he expects to finally sell half a million here and in Europe. The retail price is $5.00, the share to agents and middlemen $2.00, the royalty to the Grant family 75 cents, the cost of manufacturing and delivery $1.50, leaving 75 cents clear to Twain and his partner. The shrewd humorist had to risk his entire fortune in the enterprise, but he pluckily refused to shirk the chances of loss by dividing the possible profits, and the net result to him and his partner will be a quarter to a third of a million dollars. Mark is a very solemn and docorous attendant at the funeral.

Note: Of course, this sort of thing enraged Sam. See his answer that ran in the New York Times on Aug. 20, 1885.

In Bethlehem, New Hampshire, Howells wrote to Sam thanking him for his “kind letter,” which stated Howells was his “only author.” W.D. also wrote about literature and General Grant:

Did you ever read De Foe’s Roxana? If not, then read it, not merely for some of the deepest insights into the lying, suffering, sinning, well-meaning human soul, but the best and most natural English that a book was ever written in. [Note: Sam may have named the heroine of Pudd’nhead Wilson after Defoe’s Roxanna.]

We had a funeral service for Grant, here, yesterday, and all the time while they were pumping song and praise over his great memory, I kept thinking of the day when we lunched on pork and beans with him in New York, and longing to make them feel and see how far above their hymns he was even in such an association. How he “sits and towers” as Dante says [MTHL 2: 536].